Call logs, text messages, geo-locations and even data relating to proprietary technologies, such as Apple’s iMessage service: All of these can be downloaded by U.S. law enforcement when a suspect’s phone is plugged in and the data harvested for intelligence purposes.

President Barack Obama will wait until the sequester hits to have his first sequester-related face-to-face meeting with congressional leaders on Friday, according to a report by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl

We noted that Schmidter was not guilty of any actual law, but rather rules written by the acting judge. These rules that Schmidter is in violation of are for demonstrating outside of a “free speech zone” determined by Judge Perry. Schmidter, who was first arrested in June 2011, has maintained his innocence and that the judge’s orders he violated were a direct violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Furthermore, the very rule he was found to be in violation of has been overturned.

Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him in an email that he would “regret doing this,” the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Family, friends and supporters of Swartz have maintained the aggressive prosecution was a decisive factor in his suicide. At the time of his death, Swartz was facing a felony conviction, a prison sentence of up to 35 years and a $1-million fine.

On the witness stand earlier this month, Josey was near tears while telling the judge he swung at Guzman to knock a beer bottle out of her hand, and he wasn’t trying to hurt her. He said he and other officers were hit with beer from behind and, each time he turned to see who did it, he saw Guzman jumping up and down.

Josey conceded he never saw Guzman throw beer. Guzman was arrested that day but charges against her were later dropped.

Back when running for president in 2008, Barack Obama stated that medical marijuana was an issue for state governments, not the federal government. “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” he said, promising to end raids on medical marijuana dispensaries seen under the Bush Administration. Many soon learned his real intentions when the DEA raided four times as many marijuana dispensaries as Bush, in half the time.

With Congress unlikely to stop deep automatic spending cuts that will strike hard at the military, the fiscal stalemate is highlighting a significant shift in the Republican Party: lawmakers most keenly dedicated to shrinking the size of government are now more dominant than the bloc committed foremost to a robust national defense, particularly in the House.

Earlier this week, House Representative Charles Rangel has introduced HR 748 that will “require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 25 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or as civilian service in a Federal, State, or local government program or with a community-based agency or community-based entity, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, to provide for the registration of women under the Military Selective Service Act, and for other purposes.

Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that he would “use every procedural option” at his disposal to block the confirmation of White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan to become CIA director if the Obama administration keeps dodging questions about its policy on lethal drone strikes against terrorism suspects, including Americans.

Government agencies such as NASA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection operate aircraft-size military drones that take off from runways like airplanes. Labs in the United States have even built tiny drones that look like hummingbirds. But most drones resemble the radio-controlled aircraft and toy helicopters flown by hobbyists for decades, capable of taking off horizontally, vertically or by being thrown into the air like a trained falcon or hawk.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

States across the country are trying to protect gun ownership from the long arm of Washington by proposing bills declaring that firearms made and kept within their borders are not subject to federal restrictions.

These less-conventional methods for fighting off a would-be rapist are apparently part of Rape Aggression Defense Systems, a class that the school’s public safety department promotes as a means for female students to boost their self-defense skills.

But the fact that the site providing the pointers was updated at 6:30 p.m. Monday suggests that the move may have been motivated by the Colorado House’s passage on Monday of HB 1226, which would ban all people — including concealed-weapons permit holders — from carrying guns on the campuses of the state’s public universities.

Local and national Democrats are mobilizing against former congresswoman Debbie Halvorson, the front-runner for next week’s Democrat primary in Illinois’ special congressional election. The special election is to fill the term of disgraced Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who recently pled guilty to campaign fraud. Halvorson has run afoul of the current Democrat dogma on guns, staking out a strong position in support of gun rights.

I can’t think of any reason why the Obama Administration would keep dodging this question save one: It believes that, under certain circumstances, perhaps spelled out in a secret legal memo, it is empowered to kill American citizens or non-citizens with drones inside the United States.

Not only do the filings show the New York Fed helping to thwart another institution’s fraud case against the bank, they also reveal that the New York Fed agreed to give away what may be billions of dollars in potential legal claims.

I think people want a party that’s a little bit less aggressive on foreign policy, still believes in a strong national defense but less aggressive. They want — the young people want politicians who don’t want to put them in jail for 20 years for a nonviolent drug possession charge. So, they want a little bit different face. I think people want a little different face on immigration frankly. They don’t want somebody who wants to round people up, put them in camps and send them back to Mexico.

Friday, February 15, 2013

More than 500 people are reportedly injured, and hundreds of buildings damaged, after a meteorite streaked across the sky above Russia’s Ural Mountains Friday morning (Feb. 15) and exploded in a massive blast.

This morning, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell told Louisville, Kentucky, radio talk-show host Mandy Connell that he was working with fellow Kentucky Senator Rand Paul to find a way around Harry Reid’s obstructionism and force the Senate to vote on Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed Bill (S. 209).

Missouri Democrat state Rep. Rory Ellinger has put forth H.B. 545, which would ban “assault weapons” and many semi-automatic pistols. It would give owners of said weapons 90 days to either turn them in or get them out of the state.

I maintain that a government ban on bitcoin would be about as effective as alcohol prohibition was in the 1920s. Government prohibition doesn’t even do a good job of keeping drugs out of prisons. The demand for an item, in this case digital cash with user-defined levels of privacy, does not simply evaporate in the face of a jurisdictional ban. One could even make the case that it becomes stronger because an official recognition that Bitcoin is not only a “renegade” currency but a “so-effective-it-had-to-be-banned” currency would imbue the cryptographic money with larger than life qualities.

Americans have no Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures if they happen to be within 100 miles of the border, according to the “Executive Summary” of a still-secret report by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As the ACLU-created map above shows, nearly 2/3 of Americans (197 million people)—including the entire populations of Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, DC, and Michigan—live in this “Constitution free” zone, as do the residents of the nation’s five most populous cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia.

A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.

This past week has been a strangely clarifying political moment. It was caused by two related events: the leak of the Justice Department’s “white paper” justifying Obama’s claimed power to execute Americans without charges, followed by John Brennan’s alarming confirmation hearing (as Charles Pierce wrote: “the man whom the administration has put up to head the CIA would not say whether or not the president of the United States has the power to order the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen within the borders of the United States”). I describe last week’s process as “strange” because, for some reason, those events caused large numbers of people for the first time to recognize, accept and begin to confront truths that have long been readily apparent.

The whole sorry story of the Florida Republican Party under Jim Greer is exhibit A on how near-absolute power, combined with astronomical campaign accounts, can and did breed breathtaking arrogance and entitlement, if not outright corruption, among party leaders professing conservatism.

He doesn’t care whether or not he’s politically correct either. “PC is dangerous,” Carson said. “In this country, one of the founding principles was freedom of thought and freedom of expression. (Political correctness) puts a muzzle on people. We have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently.

He doesn’t care whether or not he’s politically correct either. “PC is dangerous,” Carson said. “In this country, one of the founding principles was freedom of thought and freedom of expression. (Political correctness) puts a muzzle on people. We have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently.

The whole sorry story of the Florida Republican Party under Jim Greer is exhibit A on how near-absolute power, combined with astronomical campaign accounts, can and did breed breathtaking arrogance and entitlement, if not outright corruption, among party leaders professing conservatism.

A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.

A Justice Department memo that surfaced this week providing legal justification for the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes against American citizens suspected of plotting terrorist attacks stands in stark contrast with the platform Barack Obama ran on in 2008 — and the civil liberties he championed as a young, liberal state senator in Illinois.

As the vehicle approached the house, officers opened fire, unloading a barrage of bullets into the back of the truck. When the shooting stopped, they quickly realized their mistake. The truck was not a Nissan Titan, but a Toyota Tacoma. The color wasn’t gray, but aqua blue. And it wasn’t Dorner inside the truck, but Carranza and her mother delivering copies of the Los Angeles Times.

As the state moves to expand healthcare coverage to millions of Californians under President Obama’s healthcare law, it faces a major obstacle: There aren’t enough doctors to treat a crush of newly insured patients.

Let's start with this: The citizen's right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right. The political principle at stake is quite simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force. This should perhaps be stated in the obverse: to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the citizenry as a whole. The history of arguments and struggles over this principle, throughout the world, is long and clear. Instituted in the context of a revolutionary struggle based on the most democratic concepts of its day, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is perhaps the clearest legal/constitutional expression of this principle, and as such, I think, is one of the most radical statutes in the world.

So ‘imminent threat,’ in other words, imminent or not imminent,” Stewart explained. “Broadly speaking, imminent in the geological sense. So, wait, we can kill an American who is in al Qaeda or al Qaeda-adjacent if they pose an imminent danger, and by ‘imminent’ we mean eventual?

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki's 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

A proposal to study whether the state should adopt its own currency is gaining traction in the state legislature from a number of lawmakers as well as conservative economists. The state House voted 65-32 earlier this week to approve the measure, and it will now go to the Senate.

“If this ever goes to court I guarantee you it will be a slam dunk support of what the administration is doing. I think one of the highlights of President Obama’s first time and the beginning of his second term is the way he’s been able to use drones against terrorists.”

It’s odd that Graham would mention this “going to court,” as the leaked DOJ white paper that everybody’s talking about explicitly says, “[T]here exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional questions.”

President Obama’s health care law will push 7 million people out of their job-based insurance coverage — nearly twice the previous estimate, according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday.

Some proposals would require buyers to show proof of insurance before they could purchase a weapon. The proposal in California would apply to anyone owning a weapon, Ting said, though the bill’s details are still being worked out.

A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” — even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.

With pump prices at their highest level on record for this time of year, the stage is set for an even greater climb in gasoline prices and expenditures than in 2012. Retail gasoline prices have surged 17 cents in a week to top $3.50 a gallon on average, posting the highest prices on record for the beginning of February.

Jackson has been a proponent of new gun control measures, saying last month that “semi-automatic” and “assault weapons” need to be banned because they pose threats to national security with the capability to “shoot down planes.

Anonymous appears to have published login and private information from over 4,000 American bank executive accounts in the name of its new Operation Last Resort campaign, demanding U.S. computer crime law reform.

On February 3rd, 1913, one of the two most historic events in US history took place: the ratification of the 16th amendment, which established Congress’ right to impose a Federal income tax on Americans, and overturned Article I, Section 9 of the US Constitution which explicitly prohibited a general income tax.

It’s important to understand that there are two big stashes of gold in the US. Fort Knox supposedly holds the gold that belongs to us. And the New York Fed holds gold that has been deposited by other countries for safe keeping. That’s where Germany’s gold would be if the US hadn’t leased it out.